#Lyekka from LEXX

[luciferjeremywhite]

From Lucifer's Notebook: Part Four -

Lucifer Jeremy White

[darkzonediaries]

A lot of LEXX seems designed for shock value, but– hot take– Lyekka’s character is genuinely, thoughtfully bold storytelling. Here you have an alien that hunts, traps, and kills random humans for food. On most shows, she’d be the thing you put down, because “humans are superiOORR!” (to quote John Crichton of Farscape), and we should always assume that human life is the most precious thing in the universe.

However, human superiority is among the many things that LEXX doesn’t take for granted, which means that the crew doesn’t have an obvious mandate to kill the man-eater. Everyone is embedded in the messy, messed-up condition of needing to eat and needing to avoid being eaten. So the crew tries to stay off of Lyekka’s menu, but the fact that humans, in general, are on it just means… not much, actually. It doesn’t mean that she’s good, evil, or in need of either killing or protecting. (Her distant cousins who denude entire planets are a different story, but their evil is a matter of imbalance, rather than violating the rules of human special-ness.)

Look around, IRL, at the horrors that humans unleash in the name of their species’ good, and at how few people question the righteousness of what we do to the rest of creation. It’s unsettling to realize how much worse we are than Lyekka, and how quickly most of our culture condemns even imaginary non-humans who put the shoe on the other foot. I wish more of us could imagine trying to find goodness without assuming that our own primacy is a built-in feature.

[darkzonediaries]

Is Lyekka a plant? A bio-weapon?

Despite former “Bio-Vizier” Mantrid addressing her as “plant lady” (“End of the Universe”) I don’t think that Lyekka actually is a plant. Rather, I suspect that her species was engineered by weapons scientists (who probably then went the way of the folks behind the Claggia-worm from “Eating Pattern”) to look like plants, as cover for their man-eating ways.

There are a number of clues to this. Perhaps most obvious, Lyekka never, so far as we know, performs photosynthesis. When she gets hungry, as in “791,” she doesn’t ask the crew to find her a sunny planet; she asks them to take her to prey animals. Neither do the “sister-Lyekkas” plant themselves in Earth’s soil and start absorbing rays during season four. Instead, they live in a closed-up asteroid-ship (so, no sun), intend to eat everyone on Earth, and have already destroyed all life on several other planets.

Lyekka herself is semi-benign, or at least not an existential threat to the entire human species. In “Garden,” the dream-derived copy of her shows the forethought to ask who will tend the garden if she eats the gardener. Put together, though, the sister-Lyekkas exhibit a rabid desire to destroy whole ecosystems, regardless of whether it serves their long-term interests. As Kai points out (I’m trying to think of which episode it was; maybe “Lyekka vs. Japan”?), they will, sooner or later, run out of planets. They brush him off by noting that there are still a lot of “tasty” planets out there.

This strikes me as pretty close to how an unethical bioengineer/weapons scientist, operating on an interplanetary level, would want his/her creations to think: Mass cooperation within a hive mind, focused on the goal of devouring everything in sight, even if it leads to their own eventual starvation. The only thing missing is an effective “kill switch” for when they quit being useful. Again, all of this sounds like the backstory of the worms from “Eating Pattern.”

Of course, the Lyekka-sisters have a far more sophisticated design than the worms. Their pods can maneuver through both vacuum (“Lyekka”) and air (“Apocalexx Now”); when not swimming, they look like harmless, stationary plants. Note that only the pod has this static, plant-like form: Lyekka herself can melt into a liquid and assume the form of, at minimum, any humanoid she wants. Sure, evolution produces some amazing disguises, but this is a strangely specific disguise for something that can function, without technological assistance, in environments ranging from Vietnam to outer space. It’s a lot like the disguise you’d make to infiltrate a society of people who 1) knew about plants and 2) considered them stationary and more or less harmless.

TL;DR: I adore Lyekka, but I also think that she’s probably a genocidal science project gone wrong. And I adore LEXX, because where else would the above sentence make perfect sense?